Last weekend I had occasion to shoot along the Regent’s Canal (again) and around the East End (again) and South Bank (again). I like to think returning to the same locales over and over again means I am improving my technique, but it’s probably just laziness. At least on Saturday we got a dab of culture as we visited the Whitecross Street Festival, which was a showcase of street art, food and a little music. More here…

Recently, other photographers on Twitter (namely @eosnetwork) mentioned that they had been to the Royal Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford, which has traditionally been the world's largest military-only airshow.

This reminded me that I had some old shots from my own visit to the Tattoo in 2004 languishing on my hard drive. Clearly I never got round to posting them when I joined Flickr about 6 months later. I had a look and sure enough there were some shots there, but far fewer than I remembered taking. These must be the post-edit shots, but clearly hadn't been processed as they came complete with dust spots, under-exposure (common problem with airshow shots) and lots of chroma noise. I had shot these on my first DSLR, a Canon 300D (Digital Rebel) which meant I daren't go above ISO400 for fear of noise, and I was shooting with an el-cheapo 70-300mm zoom. So not my sharpest or cleanest shots, but I managed to rescue a few in Lightroom. There's a Flickr set here, or just enjoy a couple of highlights below.

This is my final instalment of photos from the Glastonbury Festival 2010. The Sunday started as another blazing-hot day, but it gradually eased off and by the late afternoon a few welcome clouds brought some relief from the relentless sun. I got back to my gig-going on the main stages and saw a bit of Slash on the Pyramid, Holy F*ck in the John Peel tent, Ray Davies, Faithless and Stevie Wonder on the Pyramid Stage. Oh, and England got bundled out of the World Cup mercilessly. But all in all it was the best weather the festival had seen in years, and Stevie Wonder finishing off the festival made for a fantastic celebration of Glastonbury’s 40th anniversary.

The full set of my Glastonbury 2010 pictures can be found here, or if you’d like to view them in mini-slideshow version then you can find that below (although some of the pictures want to be bigger than this):

In advance of my last, decidedly amateur set of photos being blogged here, I want to point towards some photos taken by actual jobbing photogs, some of which are just stunning.

As per last year, Boston.com’s Big Picture (a truly excellent, themed showcase site for press photography) has done a feature on Glastonbury 2010 exhibiting some of the finest pro work to come out of the festival. There’s some truly fantastic work in here. My favourite might just be this one, by Ian Gavan for Getty:

And as per usual, a significant number of the photos come from Leon Neal of AFP (AKA the Tabasco Kid, AKA @tabascokid on Twitter) who has come out with some absolute crackers. He’s just posted two new blog entries, one focusing on the main areas and concert shots, and one that is more “off-piste” (similar to my own meanderings on my “photo mission” on Saturday night). Leon has been kind enough to correspond with me over the last year or so and it’s been fun to compare notes in the runup to, and aftermath of, the festival. Clearly different approaches, but then my livelihood does not depend on this.

Annoyingly, Leon has a few shots that are of exactly the same subjects, but executed with just a touch more professionalism, and that’s what earns him an “Utter Bastard” label from me today. Case in point, here’s my image of a lantern sculpture in the Green Futures field:

And here’s Leon’s. Damn him.

Well, practice makes perfect.

My final picture post from Glastonbury 2010 will be online sometime Friday. Then I can get on with my life 🙂